HMSR 2025 News Roundup [Harvest Stories]

HMSR 2025 News Roundup [Harvest Stories]
[Updated 2 Dec 2025]

1. First Max Ranch Master SNES run (29 Dec 2024, so just after the release of the 2024 news video)
2. StH all 40 boards filled
3. Big improvements in SNES Marriage (English)
4. iceabel's IoH runs (also 1 emu run by Yharu_Merli)
5. SoSGrB hype???
6. Qazplm's GoA work? depending how it turns out
7. cstarflare's work on SNES Best Ending
8. New JP All Photos WR
9. BtN runs (Shadow_Jikan, Xnad)
10. New original GrB WR by CinnamonStroll
11. Archive announcement?

Long time no see, mooners. Hope you've all been keeping well in my absence. I had every intention of making more videos this year, but it seems like life just had other plans. I'm not sure exactly what the future upload schedule of this channel will look like--I'd definitely love to make more content, especially covering the history of the community--but I'll have to see how it pans out. For now, I wanted to at least make sure that I threw something together for the end of the year, since there's actually been a surprising number of notable achievements, even though it's felt fairly quiet. One of the biggest happenings was of course the release of the much-anticipated Grand Bazaar remake back in August--I had a lot of fun playing through that, as I know many of us did--but there was plenty of activity in our favorite classic HM games as well, so without further ado, I'll try and go through it roughly in order.

1. First up, this run actually happened last year, 2024, but it was just after I released last year's video. On December 29, 2024, we got the first completion of Max Ranch Master on the original HM SNES, by neil5urre6l, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, with a time of 20 hours, 49 minutes, 11 seconds. explain details of category lol

2. Next I have to do my obligatory shameless StH plug, but I do think this is pretty neat. So I mentioned in last year's news video, as well as a previous video on the topic, that StH got a new glitched category when we discovered you could sneak the chicken off the farm and use it as an affection spam on all villagers. Before that discovery, StH had a total of 20 categories--9 alternate endings, plus the All Endings category, for both any% (new game) and NG+. So with the discovery of the chicken glitch, we now had a glitched version of every run, doubling the number of categories to 40.

Last year I managed to complete runs of all the any% categories, both glitchless and glitched. So this year, from January to March, I routed and completed runs of all 20 NG+ runs. NG+ in StH just means that you can carry over items and money from an existing save file, meaning you can basically obtain all the best gifts in advance. NG+ glitchless has obviously been around since the beginning, but it was never really explored that much. In particular I had fun optimizing Cake Contest, since you have quite a few options for which villager to befriend, and they're better or worse depending on their location, their schedule, whether you use the horse, etc. Anyway, so that marks the first time ever that StH has a complete leaderboard, and it was a fun lil winter project for me.

3. So another run I did a few years ago for a criminally neglected HM speedgame was a marriage run for Island of Happiness, one of the DS titles. This game catches a lot of flak for the questionable touchscreen controls, but other than that it's a really unique and cozy bit of mid-2000s HM. So in 2023 I spent weeks researching and routing a bunch of really stupidly complicated RNG manips for the run, since IoH notably requires a ton of money just to get married. I didn't really know much about the game before I started, as I hadn't played it very much casually. And even with the manip, my best time clocked in at just under 5 hours. But as it turns out, little did I know, a Japanese runner by the name of Sabitato Shin had already done an IoH marriage run back in October 2020






SNES Marriage record sequence (check other PBs throughout the period)

JPN
- 15 Apr 2025: Z4T0X 36:43
- 23 Apr 2025: Z4T0X 34:58
- 3 Jun 2025: IGiygasI 34:09

ENG
- 6 Nov 2023: RoodyOh 39:40
- 4 Apr 2025: Z4T0X 38:45
- 9 Apr 2025: Z4T0X 35:32
- 13 Apr 2025: Rh4kor 44:48*
- 14 Apr 2025: Z4T0X 34:27
- 27 Apr 2025: PizzaMonster 43:13*
- 28 Apr 2025: Andilulu 34:04
- 6 May 2025: Andilulu 32:05

* not record but German lol